Vaio notebook, uncooperative

I'm working on a VAIO PCG Z505LS notebook for a client that he bought in Vegas under what I can only surmise as somewhat shady circumstances. The notebook has no drives internal or otherwise except for the HDD. It came with Windows ME and the customer purchased Windows XP with desire to install it. In order to do so I installed his HDD on my machine and performed the wipe and install of XP. I took it back out of my machine, put it back in his and it failed to load. His bios won't load the NT kernel so in order to get it to run XP I have to flash the bios only problem is it won't boot the external floppy that I have. It sees it, nearly initializes it, then nothing. It's a USB floppy drive, the only kind that will work with this particular notebook. Oh, and on a side note every driver that I have downloaded from the Sony site has been incomplete in some way shape or form. One last thing, I know that the HDD didn't fail to load because of the transfer from my machine to his because I tried it with Windows ME and it succeeded, sans drivers of course. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

don't flash from floppy
or try USB stickdrive

Originally Posted by Unregistered

don't flash from floppy
or try USB stickdrive

I understand that and thank you. However in order to be able to run the flash from the hard drive under a DOS environment I would still need a useable version of the flash software and what I've downloaded from the Sony site is corrupted. Do you have any suggestions for possible alternates?

Thank you

Sony does NOT post DOS mode bios flashers for this model. it is a windows only flash.

take the time to read what sony says about XP on this model. if supported it WILL list how the install must be done. various sony laptops REQUIRE a specific bios and then xp then driver installs in a exact order.

if unsupported, fdisk/format the drive on another system as two partitions, and copy all of the XP cd (including hidden files) onto the sec partition and format the first partition as a fat32 bootable then install the drive to the laptop, boot from the fat32 c partition and access the d partition and run setup, note: it will take a long time unless you also load a DOS XMS memory manager first. if you don't it will notify you about this and you can ignore it and come back in about 2-3 hours.

Damien,

Point of fact Sony does. Log onto the Sony site and find out for yourself. The "PhoenixPhlash" bios utility is extracted to a bootable floppy diskette. However, your idea sounds promising. I think I'll give it a shot. I'll post again if it works. Thanks.